Review of Visual Studio Lightswitch
Lightswitch publish wizard
The Lightswitch publish wizard is a key feature. Options include running on a single machine, or on your own Microsoft web server, or hosted deployment on Windows Azure. You can also choose between a desktop or browser-hosted application. In all cases, the client application is built with Silverlight, which means they will only run on Windows or, with some limitations, on Macs where the Silverlight plug-in is installed. There is no mobile option, even though Windows Phone 7 does support Silverlight applications. Why Silverlight, when Microsoft is talking up HTML 5? It is a good question, and if Lightswitch is successful, an option to generate HTML 5 clients instead would make sense. Lightswitch is brilliant and puzzling in equal measure; and although its innovation is welcome, the risk is that the target users will be more perplexed than impressed.
Visual Studio Lightswitch is a simplified self-service development tool,” says Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of Visual Studio, Jason Zander. Microsoft has its eye on the Access market, a tool for non-specialists who need to throw together a quick database application